Right
on schedule — or shed-joule, I suppose — Telltale Games has released
The Last Resort, the second episode of their new
adventure series Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures.
Already I’m impressed, punctuality not otherwise being a plentiful
commodity in the video game world. The Last Resort
does not pick up where Episode
1: Fright of the Bumblebees left off, but begins with
a whole new self-contained story. However, what is contiguous from
the first installment is not only the same setting (West Wallaby St.
and the town shopping center) but pretty much all the same characters.
Felicity Flitt, Constable Dibbins, Mr. Paneer, Winnie Gabberley and
Major Crum all return, with one new character, a beefy suitor for
Ms. Flitt’s hand, Duncan McBisquit. Like all the others, as well as
Wallace himself, Duncan has a thick, colorful British lower-middle-class
accent. Each of these dialects adds to the atmosphere and the humor,
but can be, for American ears at least, a challenge.

Nonetheless, this time
around, I rather courageously turned off the subtitles, so that I
would enhance my immersion into the action. In most adventure games,
the most important aspect is the puzzles. It’s pretty clear by now
that the puzzles in this series are never going to get beyond the
coffee-break casual game level. No doubt this is an intelligent marketing
decision. W&G are going to pull in a lot of customers who don’t
give a flying Flitt for puzzles, or even adventure games. No point
scaring off the tourists. No, the real joy of Grand Adventures
is feeling like you’re right there with W&G in one of their fabulous
short films. This, both episodes 1 and 2, accomplish adroitly.

That
said, the puzzles did seem to me to be a little more puzzly this time
around. Still too easy with a boatload of clues always at hand and
with few other choices, but more imaginative. And more varied. The
one thing Telltale has done is to at least throw in a number of different
types of puzzles. You still spend part of your time playing as Wallace
and part as Gromit, though Wallace gets most of the screen time in
this episode. As in the films, Gromit clearly is the action hero of
this series and he gets another action-puzzle showcase. Mrs. Gabberley
throws you another fill-in-the-blanks puzzle, and with the subtitles
off this perhaps is the most daunting obstacle in the game. She has
the thickest accent, with some sort of patois that is largely beyond
me. “Sommat” for “something,” for instance. (At
least, I think it’s “something.”) Constable Dibbins and
Major Crum do their standard daft logic routines, and Mr. Paneer is
still the grocery world’s best and brightest. Felicity this time around
shows a more pronounced romantic interest in her next-door neighbor,
resoundingly unreciprocated. The new guy, Duncan, does double duty
as the bad guy and the fall guy. I wonder if he’s going to be back
for the next installment, Muzzled!

As with Bees,
the action is broken up into a handful of chapters. Each has its own
set of goals. These are usually pretty standard adventure game objectives,
like find a list of items. This episode does have one chapter that
plays like an Agatha Christie locked-room whodunit. Played for laughs,
to be sure, but well done nonetheless. That is, the action still boils
down to a treasure hunt, but they nailed the mystery atmosphere. Other
adventures have used detective story devices, of course, but the way
it was adapted here to the W&G world I thought was quite clever,
and fun. Along with Gromit’s action brainteasers, this series has
now sprouted at least two new adventure gameplay concepts.

I
know a lot of people like to hear about the plot in game reviews,
but, really, the plot is the main course here. It would be unfair
to ladle out too much. Suffice to say, The Last Resort
starts out with Wallace and Gromit packing themselves off for a beach
holiday at Britain’s famed resort, Blackpool (the one with all the
boardwalk carnival attractions). However, the skies open up and not
only cancel the trip, but flood out Wallace’s basement. Ever the resourceful
one, Wallace gets the brilliant idea to recreate Blackpool’s amenities,
including the seashore, and the sea, in his basement. Complications,
as you might guess, ensue.

After moaning a bit about
the game engine in my review
of Bees, I decided to take my own advice and
play Resort at 3 on the graphics scale. While there
was a noticeable drop-off in the quality of the visuals, I didn’t
run into the occasional glitch I did when playing Bees
on 5. On the other hand, I have a year-old computer with a healthy-sized
graphics card. Who are these folks that the 9 setting has been designed
for? NASA scientists playing on Cray supercomputers at the Jet Propulsion
Lab? I also had an ear out waiting for unasked-for hints with the
hint meter on “Never.” This seemed better as well. At least,
I didn’t receive any unwanted hints. Unless I was simply too dense
to notice them, of course. I also complained about the lack of a game
manual in the download. As I suspected, this is supplied on the W&G
website. Here’s the direct
link. This page of controls informed me, among other things, that
you can cycle through the hotspots on any screen, as well as highlight
them all (graphics card permitting) by hitting the tab key. I still
think that using the mouse and the keyboard is a bit of a headache,
but I’m getting better at it. I also discovered this time that you
can hit the space bar to skip ahead in dialogue.

The
music, voice acting and all that other stuff is just as expert this
time around as it was in Bees. Telltale Games is
to be congratulated again for another beautiful and entertaining rendering
of Wallace and Gromit into the digital world. I’m still going to give
The Last Resort a B+, but only because it’s hard
to award top honors to what is essentially a casual game, brilliant
as it is. Once again, I’m looking forward to the next installment,
Muzzled! Unlike Bees, The
Last Resort ends with a short teaser for the next mini-game,
but they really didn’t need to. I’m already hooked. Luckily for me,
since all four episodes are already paid for.

END OF REVIEW:
START OF OPTIONAL GENERAL COMMENTARY:

Computer
graphics have been improving steadily for several decades, and each
new generation marvels at the “lifelike” quality of the
models and the gameworld, but I think it is fair to say now that while
playing a game like Grand Adventures (cranked up
to 7 or above) there is no discernible difference between it and an
actual animated cartoon. You feel like you’re up there, onscreen wandering
around and interacting with the characters. Personally, I worry that
this effect is so profound now that games are no longer going to feel
the need to throw in puzzles to keep players interested. That is,
the simple pleasure of wandering around in the virtual world will
be the end in itself, not stopping to overcome some obstacle. Players
might even come to resent the puzzles as an annoying distraction,
as a break in the verisimilitude.

Many players must already
feel this way, otherwise why do game developers go to so much trouble
nowadays to make the puzzles as unobtrusive as possible? I haven’t
tried this, but I would imagine that playing The Last Resort or The
Fright of the Bumblebees with the hint meter on “Often”
is as close to puzzle-free adventuring as your average stroll through
an actual park. Do they only throw in puzzles in the first place to
appease old fogies like me? I wonder. I’m not really an old-timer
anyway. I’ve read on the web that the players of the very first graphic
adventures, the early Sierra games, would go weeks, even months without
progressing in a game, because there was no internet with all its
ready help and walkthroughs. If you didn’t have a friend who’d gotten
farther than you, you were truly on your own. But the whole satisfaction
of a puzzle is solving it yourself. I know from experience that the
ones you solve after a couple of weeks, and occasionally even after
a couple of years, are, perhaps perversely, the most satisfying.

Telltale Games more than
most developers does a remarkable job of recreating the worlds of
its franchises. Sam and Max were a comic strip, but the Tellgame series
still makes you feel like you’re in their world. Being able to interact
with Wallace and Gromit is, of course, a gas. Wouldn’t it be great
if you could have this same experience with all your favorite animated
cartoons? To accompany Bugs while eluding Elmer? To ride with George
Jetson to work in his flying car? But the thing I most love about
adventure games is the combination of puzzles with story. Otherwise,
one would just play crosswords, or Sokoban. Or read Dickens. It’s
the two working seamlessly together that makes for the best “interactive”
experience.

IMHO.

System Requirements:

• Operating system: Windows
  XP / Vista
• Processor: 2.0 GHz or
  better (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent recommended)
• Memory: 512MB (1GB recommended)
• Hard disk space: 310MB
• Video: 64MB DirectX
  8.1-compliant video card (128MB recommended)
• Sound: DirectX 8.1 sound
  device
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
  or better